@petemontdc.com
Researcher and writer focused on right-wing movements for Right Wing Watch, a project of People For the American Way. Lover of dogs, poetry, singing, husband. Pennsylvania raised, long roots in DC. UU. Personal account. He/him.
When your boss is pushing you to goose those numbers at all costs silly things like "following the law" and "making sure someone has access to live-preserving medication" just get in the way.
Imagine being a US service member - or a member of a military family - in harm’s way right now thanks to Trump, and watching him refuse to answer a reporter's question about Russia helping Iran kill Americans because they dared to ask during a college sports roundtable on the sixth day of the war.
America First apparently doesn't include taking care of Americans overseas
If you took $1 billion and gave it to the endowment of a different small college each day, they could each provide a free college education to several hundred students per year in perpetuity. Instead we are using that money to bomb schools and kill students in Iran, for no clearly stated purpose.
"Who will tell Trump he's not God's anointed?"
Religious-right leaders have been telling him for years that he's on a mission from God. For a narcissist like Trump, that's gasoline on a raging dumpster fire.
baptistnews.com/article/who-...
More love, please!
Always worthwhile to read Sarah Posner analysis of the US Christian Right. Also, here's a bit from the folks who see Trump and his war as fulfillment of prophecy:
Himes on war powers: "That is not a debate that the Republicans want to have, because a year ago they turned the Congress into the Russian Duma. We don't have a Congress today. We have a majority party in the House and Senate that's going to do exactly what Donald Trump tells them to do."
Dana Perino bragged about the Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner pretending they were negotiating with Iran while the Pentagon planned an attack. Witkoff is part of the Ukraine/Russia negotiations .Kushner is part of the plan to rebuild Gaza. Who would trust them after this?
The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s GOP started a group chat for conservative students — and within 3 weeks, it was filled with over 400 instances of the N-word, Nazi rhetoric and writings of "dozens of ways of violently killing Black people"
Love @jamestalarico.bsky.social framing here both for Texas and national moment.
Much of what MAGA does is flagrantly illegal. Some of it is legal.
All of it is corrupt.
"If you are inclined to jettison liberalism and join the forces of Trumpism because you are eager to crush people whom you imagine to be demonic, you ought to consider that perhaps, without knowing or intending it, you are not serving God at all. You are working for the other guy." bit.ly/3OOY8fB
I’ve been notified about another death in ICE custody.
This marks a stunning 40 deaths during the second Trump administration.
This cannot continue. There must be real accountability for ICE and DHS.
But we're not at war, right?
“In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive...[T]he trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man."
-- James Madison
www.theunpopulist.net/p/trumps-una...
He's not the only one following this playbook...
Red alert: Trump officials at mtg called by Michael Flynn, who wanted Trump to declare martial law after losing in 2020, and Cleta Mitchell, who took part in the call on which Trump tried to bully Georgia's secretary of state into "finding" enough votes to reverse his loss @propublica.org
BREAKING: As I was first to report earlier, Trump has nominated Bradford Wilson, who does not meet the statutory requirements—which include that the nominee be nonpartisan and professionally qualified—to be the next Archivist of the United States.
lastcampaign.substack.com/p/breaking-t...
Texas allowed to do racial gerrymader, but New York can't protect minority voting rights in a redistricting of one seat.
Court is bunch of political hacks - and expanding Court is top priority or every other state & federal policy is at risk.
www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
The propaganda from the "White House Prayer Team" - a project of MAGA prayer warriors Intercessors for America - is shameless. The subject line of the email about Trump launching a war on Iran is "Has President Trump Stopped Another War?"
this one fucked me up so much. guy turns his life around after a drug conviction, becomes a happy, beloved, pet rescuing houseboat dad who undersells his mechanic services so poor folks can afford them. ICE grabs him one day out of the hospital for heart problems which then kill him. horrifying
The “big picture” here, to use Axios lingo, is that for a year team Trump has destroyed important counter-terror tools and diverted counter-terror personnel to immigration enforcement.
And that Patel, Noem, & Gabbard have no qualifications and are riotously incompetent.
www.axios.com/2026/03/02/i...
Since taking over the helm, VA Secretary Doug Collins has imported DOGE-like chaos into the veterans health care system. buff.ly/5Rw5cTo
Perhaps the worst part of the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger is how bad a business deal it is. buff.ly/3gev6nN
“Earlier this year, Geraldo Lunas Campos died at the Camp East Montana facility in Texas. Witnesses report he was choked to death by guards. An autopsy by the county medical examiner determined his death was a homicide… Another man recently died at the same facility. Instead of transferring him to the local medical examiner, DHS moved his body to a nearby army base—which is now refusing to release the results of his autopsy.”
"When human beings are dying under federal supervision, oversight is not optional. It is our responsibility.” - Sen. Dick Durbin
The only thing you need to know is what's highlighted here.
A big part of the authoritarian playbook is war. War takes over the news. War blots out criticism. War divides a nation’s people, subjecting those against it to being called unpatriotic. War grants leaders all sorts of emergency powers. War consumes everything else.
We mustn’t let this war do so.
Combine a chief executive who lacks object permanence and theory of mind with a cavorting devilry of a cabinet and administration with the ability to make money off the specific timing of their next atrocity and you’ve got enough potential depravity to embarrass Caligula
"That's the way it is."
Trump on the American service members killed in his illegal war.
